Free Screen Capture Software That Clicks With Me

More and more, I’m find the necessity to create screen capture images of my desktop or a portion of a browser window more and more.

Typically, I’ve used the actual “Prt Sc” Print Screen button or the SHIFT+ALT+PRT SC combo to capture just the active window. This puts the screen grab into the clipboard memory.

From there, it’s an easy paste into MS Paint to resize or annotate with arrows, callout boxes, etc before saving it as “screen-URLorPROGRAMNAME.jpg” to use elsewhere – on blogs, twitpic, email, etc.

I’ve used a couple of Windows screen capture apps but none does what I want without cluttering my icon tray and hogging up resources. Recently, I’ve been testing out browser-based apps that do pretty much all I need. . .

One of them is called FireShot Pro and I used it with FireFox:

It’s been an easy-to-use screen capture program that works as a live browser plugin. The free version does most of what I need and even does the “capture-the-entire-webpage-running-down-below-the-fold-on-and-on-and-on” thing that you sometimes see in magazines and tutorial websites.

The BIGGIE feature that I like is that it allows you to immediately edit and annotate the screen grab image before saving the file WITHOUT opening up a new application.

One downer is that the free version doesn’t seem to include the “define capture area” feature where you can click and drag a rectangle on the screen to define the area of the screen capture. This adds one more step in editing to crop the image instead, but hey, it’s a free app. (If I am wrong about this and you know how to do this function, please let me know and leave a comment below! Or if someone wants to get me a free upgrade to FireShot Pro, I’m all ears!)

1 Response

I’ve been using SnagIt for a couple of years now in both the PC version and the newly released Mac Version. The tool is extremely easy to use, I like the fact that you can create a keyboard shortcut to easy launch the capture feature. Additionally, you can select certain areas of the screen to capture, entire windows, or scrolling windows which is extremely useful when trying to capture entire webpages.
The app for editing withing SnagIt isn’t too bad either for times when bringing the image into PhotoShop is overkill.